The expansion of the Internet and the World Wide Web has enabled computer users to explore media in various different forms and in various different ways. Video content sharing on websites has developed into a worldwide phenomenon, supported by many websites. On average, over 10,000 videos are posted every day, and this number is increasing as the tools and opportunities for capturing video become easy to use and more widespread. The vastness of a video repository hosted by a video hosting website causes users to rely on search engines as one way to retrieve videos of interest.
A typical search engine takes user input in forms of search terms or keywords, searches through a video database to find videos that match the user's query and returns search results. For example, if videos are transcribed or otherwise labeled with text, text retrieval techniques can be used to locate videos of interest for users. Other video retrieval methods, such as content-based queries and metadata queries, can be used to find videos that match the user's search terms.
Many conventional formats for presenting search results use a list of links, URLs, or thumbnails. Each individual link in the list represents a video that satisfies the user's query, and points to a location where the video is stored in the video database. However, even the search results generated by the most sophisticated video content analysis will be of little value unless it can be presented in an easy and appealing manner for a user to consume the results. For example, due to the vastness of a video repository hosted by a video hosting website, some search results often contain a long list of links, and a user is not able to visually see whether a video found by the search engine truly contains the relevant content without actually playing the video. Compounding this, a long list of links does not provide a visual presentation of the correlation among the videos in the list.